How Commodification Happens

Corporate capitalism is history’s biggest and most successful form of totalitarianism. Properly defined, totalitarianism is any modern, industrial social order in which the ruling class endeavors to control the details of all three of modern, industrial life’s experiential spheres. These spheres are politics, the economy/paid work, and leisure.

In corporate capitalism/market totalitarianism, elite administration of leisure-time activities is carried out competitively, as a routine business activity, via marketing campaigns. The methods deployed in the effort are meticulous and lavishly funded. Given the profitability of successful redesigns of existing off-the-job habits, their pursuit is systemic and zealous. As the investing class continually seeks such successes, the outcome is ever-advancing commercialization and commodification of ordinary citizens’ personal lives.

One recent example of the basic process is the rise of the new product known as “Tile.” This is a radio-signal-sending tab that users attach to objects in order to be able to use their cellular telephones to find those objects when they become lost somewhere in the densifying galaxy of clutter that results from market totalitarianism’s normal operation. One example of Tile in action? Using your cell phone to find your television’s remote control.

The logic behind this (cough) great advance in human technology is simple. As Tile’s Chief Marketing Officer explains it to Advertising Age, “[W]e have roughly 90% share of this category that we created, but it’s still a low awareness category and there’s an opportunity to build a really meaningful brand in this space.”

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Consumer Trap: The Book

“meticulous and illuminating…lays bare some of the most important developments of the twentieth century….sketches directions for a humane alternative to domination by ‘corporate overlords’ and the state power to which they are closely linked”